Happy New Year MYZONE community! Now is the time when many of us are setting our health and fitness goals for the year, whether they be to lose weight, change our body composition, improve our sports performance, etc. Take advantage of MYZONE's fitness accountability app when you make your goals to help stay on track.

While it’s important to have goals for ourselves, achieving our New Year’s resolutions is about more than just setting the intention to change; it’s about going out and doing it. Though writing down our goals can be simple and even exciting, actually accomplishing them is much harder. So tough, in fact, that only 8% of people successfully achieve their resolutions. 

Let’s work together as a MYZONE community to bump that percentage up in 2017! Here are our top tips on making your New Year’s Resolutions work for you – so you can achieve them!

1. Set small goals that will help you to achieve the big goals.

We’re all for setting goals that are big enough to scare us a little. However, setting out with the one giant goal in mind can feel so overwhelming that it becomes easier to give up altogether.

This is why we encourage you to set short-term (days or weeks), process (actions you will take) goals and use MYZONE's fitness accountability app to stay on track. Let’s say you want to lose 50 pounds by the end of the year. In addition to setting this long-term, outcome-focused goal, you will set goals for the behaviors you will do on your way to achieving the big goal. For example, you might say that in order to lose 50 pounds this year, you will aim to lose one pound per week. To do this, you will hit the gym for two GREEN zone-focused workouts and two YELLOW-zone focused workouts each week. Now, you have specific goals that you can take action upon and feel satisfied when you achieve them each week. If weight loss is your goal, be sure to include some nutrition-related goals, as nutrition will play a huge role in your success!

2. Form goals around the things you like to do.

Too often, we set goals around things we genuinely don’t enjoy doing. What if instead, we set goals around the activities we enjoy? Using the example above, maybe you want to lose 50 pounds in one year but aren’t a gym person. No problem – there are many other ways to be physically active!

Adjust your short-term process goals to make them appeal to you. Perhaps taking your children/grandchildren for a walk four times per week is a better way to get moving. Strap on your MYZONE belt so you can gauge the intensity of your activity. If you notice that you’re not working in the zones you’d like, you can add in some bodyweight exercises during your walk.

The bottom line is that reaching our health and fitness goals doesn’t have to feel like a punishment. It may take some creative thinking, but we know you can find a way to make the process of achieving your goals enjoyable!

3. Track your progress.

This one may seem obvious but hear us out – we don’t want you to just track your progress toward that big goal (how much weight you’ve lost if we’re continuing with this example). We recommend tracking your short-term process goals, as well.

MYZONE makes it simple by keeping a record of all of your workouts in your Activity Calendar on its fitness accountability app. At the end of each week, reflect back on the workouts you’ve done. Did you achieve the frequency of sessions you were aiming for? Were you in the zones you intended for the majority of your workout?

There’s another factor at play here aside from keeping record of your progress. Each time we see that we’ve achieved a goal, we are rewarded with a small hit of dopamine, a neurotransmitter responsible for our sense of pleasure. This dopamine response plays a role in habit formation, so tracking our progress can cause us to continue making healthy choices in the future!

4. Find accountability in the MYZONE community.

You may have heard that it’s always a good idea to tell someone your goal, and it’s true! The MYZONE community is full of trainers and exercisers who want to see you succeed. Share your goals with us! Doing so will make your goal real for you and give others the opportunity to cheer you on and offer assistance.

If you haven’t already, check out the Social Connections page of your MYZONE online profile or on your MYZONE fitness accountability app. There, you can engage with MYZONE users within your fitness club and all over the world. We’d also love to know your goals – let us know through the MYZONE Facebook page, Instagram, and Twitter!

We wish you the best of luck with your 2017 goals! Let us know how it’s going and be sure to use MYZONE's fitness accountability app! Post to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and use the hashtags #myzonemoves and #effortrewarded so we can see how you are smashing your resolutions.

For more tips on how to use the fitness heart rate tracking capabilities of MYZONE, follow us during Fitness Fridays on Facebook Live (subscribe on MYZONE’s Facebook Page) – 8 am PT, 11 am ET.

We wish you a very happy and healthy year. And…

Keep moving forward!